While the original site isn’t feeling well:
https://archive.md/YV9AQ
Leaving Google
71–80 of 464 posts
Re: Leaving Google
#72Seems takeaway is if Google didn't cut this person's pay by 10 per cent then all their "shitty behavior" like Project Maven and so on would have been just fine.
Re: Leaving Google
#73I joined in 2010 and left in 2019. The company I joined was very different than the one I left. Every single one of Google's problems can be traced back to scale. Loss of trust, distance to top leadership, tone-deafness, repeated failures, escalating surveillance dystopia, perf management overhead, leaks...all of them are fundamentally due to scale. And scale is simply because greed. Gotta make that 23% YoY revenue g…
> And scale is simply because greed. Is it possible that it is simply because of survival? The general theme of business I see is if you do not keep up with others, you will lose to your competitors. Especially in a winner take all business with network effects and low marginal costs like tech.
collective systemic greed
Re: Leaving Google
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is absurd. I haven't been asked to file timesheets (other than for days off) as a sweng in over a decade, including when I was at Google. Management on that team has completely lost it.
I read that as the "30 minute increment" tracking is used as a short term punishment for not meeting the deadline.
Wow I think you’re right upon reread. I read it as having to account for all that time over the previous period to show how they couldn’t have done a better job/
Re: Leaving Google
#75I joined in 2010 and left in 2019. The company I joined was very different than the one I left. Every single one of Google's problems can be traced back to scale. Loss of trust, distance to top leadership, tone-deafness, repeated failures, escalating surveillance dystopia, perf management overhead, leaks...all of them are fundamentally due to scale. And scale is simply because greed. Gotta make that 23% YoY revenue g…
> And scale is simply because greed. Is it possible that it is simply because of survival? The general theme of business I see is if you do not keep up with others, you will lose to your competitors. Especially in a winner take all business with network effects and low marginal costs like tech.
Keeping up with the competition, if you’re talking about quality of product/service, isn’t the same thing as growing yearly revenues, which usually entails scaling up operations and product lines to more places and more customers, which no business has to do just for the sake of survival. See for example long-surviving small- to medium-scale family businesses. There doesn’t seem to be another motivation for chasing YoY revenue growth other than greed.
Re: Leaving Google
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked at Google from 2005 to 2013, seeing it grow from 4,000 to 50,000 employees during this time. In 2005, it was a wonderful, prestigious place to work with many great people and a startup vibe, the place was vibrant. By 2013, Larry and Sergey were put out to pasture, and the company took on a much more bureaucratic, compartmentalized feel. I was working hard, most of my work was fighting bureaucracy and optimiz…
I was there 2006-2009. Each year a new level of management appeared above me, and things got ever more "political" and perf centric. Just as people are different at age 10, 20 and 40, companies are different in different stages and sizes. Know what you want and look for it. I realized I want to be at small companies, and have not worked at a company larger than 25 people since.
I've found the sweet spot to be around 50-200. I've always worked at smaller companies, and the 10-person company I worked at was the only terrible experience of the bunch. It sounds weird to say, but... I'm really glad to have an HR department again.
I'm sure it varies widely. I just feel like a tiny company leaves too much room for unhealthy and unprofessional dynamics, even though I'm sure it can be perfectly fine in other cases. Just depends on the people.
Re: Leaving Google
#77> PMs made all the decisions. Engineers (at least at my level) had very little influence. This is interesting given Google used to have a reputation for being an "engineer led" organization, I guess that's slowly changing over time.
You either die a hero, etc etc. I wonder if there's any "big, established" company where IC engineers have more weight than the PHB types. I'd be genuinely curious if anyone knows of some good examples, I suppose HN would be the place where people might. It seems like that's one of the natural equilibrating factors that offer some small amount of competitive grace to Davids competing against Goliaths. Google hasn't b…
That can happen when corporate leadership is dominated by a technical founder. Once MBAs and sales/marketing alums run the show it always turns into a grindhouse. They don't fundamentally understand the work that goes into the product and so they rule by metrics to make their dev factory "more efficient".
Re: Leaving Google
#78I think it’s interesting that the good things about working there had nothing to do with the employer and the bad things had everything to do with the employer. Indeed, this line is the takeaway, in my opinion: “…is because we've been at least a little brainwashed into thinking a job at Google is the pinnacle of employment.” I haven’t worked for one so this take might be quite hot, but I get the sense that big tech c…
There are teams at Google and other big tech companies that are working on groundbreaking things. Working at these companies gives you a chance to do very "impactful" things. Is that sense of purpose sometimes abused to exploit workers? Sure. But there are some really smart folks doing amazing things that they'd never have a chance to do working anywhere else.
Do you have to be elite to work there? In some roles you absolutely do. In other roles you just need to do the work. You're often working alongside people who care a great deal(and some unknowingly toxic people whose self-worth seems to come solely from their career achievements), and that can raise the bar for what you and/or the company expect from yourself.
The "toxic" thing in my experience often just comes from rapid, unmanaged growth. The company is literally morphing into something new with every passing day. People are being sucked up the management chain without merit. Systems aren't yet in place to deal with the changes. New employees are flooding in faster than they can assimilate the old culture.
I'm not saying I love the valley or anything, but I'm glad I got to spend a couple years of my life here and contribute 0.0001% to some of the greatest discoveries in the last few decades. I hope more engineers get a chance to have that feeling.
Re: Leaving Google
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I read at the time, she wasn’t fired for the content of the paper (though she initially made it sound like this before more details became public). She gave the company an ultimatum to reveal the name of an anonymous reviewer or she would quit, and they took her threat seriously.
She was subjected to a process that wasn't the norm at Google. I'd be pretty upset too. The details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25313994 Discussion about whether the review process was normal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25308847
Other people circumventing policy doesn't mean that it is fine for her to do it. It is really hard to judge as you do without more data on the circumstances of the other people circumventing the policy and not getting punished, right now we have to take their word that what she did wasn't worse than what most others did. We can't know that. Similarly one engineer force pushing code to fix an issue might be fine, but another engineer doing the same thing might not be fine and the second gets investigated, is that unfair? We can't tell, there isn't enough information here.
Re: Leaving Google
#80Seems takeaway is if Google didn't cut this person's pay by 10 per cent then all their "shitty behavior" like Project Maven and so on would have been just fine.
Another article on the site expands on this:
> I still feel uncertain about everything though. Google approved my remote work application last week, but I haven't gotten a new offer letter yet, and I've been told to expect a pay cut of at least 10% because the market rate for software engineers is supposedly lower in southern California. This feels like a shitty thing to do. My work is not less valuable. It's a reminder that this is nothing more than a business relationship, and the company is not interested in loyalty to workers or support in a difficult time. I'm not sure what, if anything, I'm going to do yet, but it has me thinking harder about my career and future.
Not sure why _this_ is what it took to get to that revelation, but better late than never. But on the point about value vs. cost of living... I mean how do you work as a developer in the United States and not notice you get paid a lot more to do this work than people in other places?